Keynote speakers
Abstract
The past few years have witnessed the rise of cloud computing, a paradigm that harnesses the massive resource capacity of data centers to support Internet services and applications in a scalable, flexible, reliable and cost-efficient manner. However, despite its success, recent literature has shown that effectively managing resources in production cloud environments remains to be a difficult challenge. A key reason behind this difficulty is that both resources and workloads found in production environments are heterogeneous. In particular, large cloud data centers often consist of machines with heterogeneous resource capacities and performance characteristics. At the same time, real cloud workloads show significant diversity in terms of priority, resource requirements, demand characteristics and performance objectives. Consequently, finding an effective resource management solution that leverages resource heterogeneity to support diverse application performance objectives becomes a difficult problem.
The focus of this talk will be on understanding the research challenges introduced by resource and workload heterogeneity in production cloud environments. We will first provide a characterization of workload and resource heterogeneities found in production data centers, and highlight the key challenges introduced by them. We will then describe our recent work towards addressing some of these challenges. Finally, we will outline several key directions for future research.
Biography
Raouf Boutaba is a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and a distinguished visiting professor at POSTECH (South Korea). He served as a distinguished speaker of the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Computer Society. He is the founding chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Autonomic Communications, and the founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (2007-2010). He is currently on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of Network and Systems Management, and on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the IEEE Communication Surveys and Tutorials, the KICS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks, the International Journal on Network Management (ACM/Wiley), the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (Wiley) and the Journal on Internet Services and Applications (Springer).
His research interests include resource and service management in networked systems. He has published extensively in these areas and received several journal and conference best paper awards such as the IEEE 2008 Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award, the 2001 KICS/IEEE Journal on Communications and Networks Best Paper Award, the IM 2007 and 2009 and the CNSM 2010 Best Paper Awards among others. He also received several recognitions such as the Premier's Research Excellence Award, two Nortel research excellence Awards, a fellowship of the Faculty of Mathematics, two David R. Cheriton faculty fellowships, 2 outstanding performance awards at Waterloo and the NSERC discovery accelerator award. He has also received the IEEE Communications Society Hal Sobol Award and the IFIP Silver Core in 2007, the IEEE Communications Society Joe LociCero award and the IFIP/IEEE Dan Stokesbury award in 2009, and the IFIP/IEEE Salah Aidarous award in 2012. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
